Ever since downvotes for questions have been made free, I find that I've been more actively voting (both up and down) on questions. The old -1 rep penalty was a major deterrent for me for downvoting terrible questions, especially when there are so many of them and the askers have no intention on staying in the community. Voting to close was my main way of dealing with these questions. I know many people feel the same way.

Unfortunately, I don't think many people who regular Stack Overflow but not meta are even aware of this change. They too probably would be voting much more had they known.

For example, there was a question that came out which was essentially a "plz send teh codez!" kind of question. I saw the question and the request and saw this is not a question for Stack Overflow so I downvoted it and voted to close as NARQ. It took a little while but as others saw the question, they agreed and voted to close it. As of right now, the question only has two downvotes (mine and the NARQ close). Immediately after closing, the person "asked" again the same question. It immediately was closed as being an exact duplicate of the previous question. It only has one downvote (mine). I bet there would be a lot more if people were more aware of this.

Is there anything that can be done to raise awareness of this change? I think the more people start using it, the less likely we'll see 0 vote bad questions and the better Stack Overflow will be. I added a comment trying to point out that it is free now but it was too late and I don't think people have seen it. Perhaps a one time reminder when you vote to close a question as off-topic or not a real question?

Having banners and such would be a bit overkill IMHO. What I had in mind was that if you did a certain action that relates to saying that this is a terrible question, a reminder is shown along the lines of, "Do you think this is a bad question? Let everyone else know what you think by downvoting it with no penalty to you." Similar to how it is for the upvote reminders. What those actions are, I don't know yet but I hope you get the idea.
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Jeff MercadoMay 15 '11 at 6:39

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@Jeff Mercado: I think this would be really annoying, but then I still find it hard to believe people were put off downvoting because of a (usually temporary, due to deletion,) loss of 1 rep. You may as well prompt people to try to improve the post / leave a comment about how it can be improved while you're at it.
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forsvarirMay 15 '11 at 8:58

I think people are put off downvoting in marginal cases, not so much for egregiously bad questions.
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Neil FeinMay 16 '11 at 3:21

@forsvarir: I'm not talking about showing a message all the time. At least, I had always thought that the upvote reminders were only shown to newer users or at the very least, a one time only message. Since this is a relatively new change, I think a one time only message should be enough for people to notice.
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Jeff MercadoMay 16 '11 at 15:07

@Jeff Yeah I wondered that and had to double check "What idiot posted that answer! Oh wait...", but no - this is definitely someone elses post.
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JustinMay 16 '11 at 1:58

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I notice that the question itself does not have any votes on it. I presume you took back that vote. Or did you actually downvote one of the answers? Those are not free.
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Jeff MercadoMay 16 '11 at 2:02

Looks like the question title needs to be "Can we raise the awareness that answer downvotes are NOT free?"... I didn't realize that either :) I thought the change applied to all downvotes.
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user147272May 16 '11 at 3:33